The Left has no time for liberty: just ask the Gordonstoun Girl

Minette Marrin

12:01AM BST 16 Jul 2001

FOR if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle? My sentiments exactly. There have been a great many uncertain sounds buzzing about lately, not least in the Conservative leadership battle, even to the point where people seriously imagine that there is little difference between Conservatism and New Labour.

It is hard to prepare to do battle about very little. But there is in fact a very great difference, which needs to be trumpeted about loudly and clearly. It has to do with freedom.

New Labour, like Old Labour, is the party of unfreedom, of intrusion, of excessive legislation, regulation, standardisation, conformity, guidelines, goals and repression generally. The Conservative Party is, or ought to be, the party of freedom. And freedom is under attack in this country.

It is, however, being defended in The Daily Telegraph. This week, the editor sounded the trumpet very certainly for A Free Country, for a major campaign for freedom. He insists this campaign is not partisan; freedom lovers from across the political world can and should unite. But I find it difficult not to be partisan, because I do not really believe that people of vaguely socialist, social democrat, meliorist or egalitarian tendencies can ever be genuinely interested in freedom, except for themselves personally.

The love of freedom, whatever anyone else's rhetoric may be, is a Conservative virtue - one of the greatest - though rather an alarmingly large number of Conservatives don't seem to be all that keen on it. Be that as it may, at almost exactly the moment that the Telegraph announced its campaign for A Free Country, a perfect example of British unfreedom hit the news.

It is the case of the Gordonstoun Girl. A clever 16-year-old in foster care in Wrexham won a place and a bursary at Gordonstoun, Prince Charles's old school in Scotland.

The Prince may have been rather miserable there, but these days it has an excellent reputation. In any case, the girl, her foster parents, her own parents, her grandparents and her teachers all wanted her to go; the grandparents and Gordonstoun were prepared to cover the fees.

But then down came the squelching dead hand of the local council. Wrexham social services refused to let her go. It knew about her offer of a place eight months ago, but only recently told her that she could not take it up. One could get very excited about its reasons for this extraordinary refusal, but that seems to me to miss the point.

A resentment of private schools, or of elitism, or even (quaintly enough) of Telegraph readers, all of which have been mentioned, may lie behind it. But we all have our prejudices.

The point is that the council had no right to impose them on this young girl, against her express wishes and against the known wishes of what they would call, in carespeak, her "network of support", anglice her family and friends.

Social services has no right, because it has no statutory duty, to impose any ideology on anyone in its care: its overriding duty here, as Wrexham's director of social services says himself, is to safeguard and promote the safety and welfare of the young person in question.

Going to Gordonstoun (not at council expense) could not conceivably represent any threat whatsoever to her safety and welfare, to put it no more strongly than that; more positively, one could say it offers her a chance of academic excellence, and specialist teaching in her chosen subject, in a safe and respectable environment, which she wouldn't otherwise get.

What was wrong here was the complete absence of a presumption in favour of freedom - the young girl's freedom, and her family's, to do what they legally and reasonably want, regardless of the personal orthodoxies of social workers. In fact, this is a presumption against freedom, and you see this unthinking, institutionalised disrespect for freedom in social services departments up and down the country.

I apologise to all those social workers who, by contrast, think carefully for themselves, and act wisely; because they think independently, they will know there is a lot of truth in what I am saying. I have met one or two who will admit it.

There is a mindset of unfreedom firmly institutionalised in our care services, and the case of the Gordonstoun Girl is a perfect example of it. The case has a happy ending, up to a point.

The council has now backed down. The reason is not edifying, however. The Gordonstoun Girl (or her "support network") was smart enough to contact the new Children's Commissioner, Peter Clark, and make a very effective fuss, whereupon he made a very effective fuss; unpleasant publicity followed, the young girl has spoken very quotably to the press and, lo and behold, social services has bowed to public pressure.

But we are left knowing that a less clever girl and a less capable family would have achieved nothing; most people in the clutches of social services do not belong to the fuss-making classes.

I admit that it was the Labour Government that appointed the Children's Commissioner, and he has done a good job here - he is obviously Labour with a small "c". But the sensibility behind this nonsense is of the Left.

I can think of other, much more distressing examples, where choice is systematically, routinely denied, and freedom ignored. It is made all the more infuriating by the constant official prattle of choice, inclusion, consultation and diversity: most of that means just the opposite, like much of carespeak. This is where the battle for freedom should begin. I wonder who dares.